There's a $10 million race to build you a robot avatar by 2021

The Walk-Man humanoid robot is tested for use with emergency response teams. The Avatar XPrize is challenging teams to create a robot avatar that can let humans see, hear and feel objects from anywhere in the world. (image: Reuters)

AUSTIN — Four years from now, physical attendance at SXSW could be optional for those who choose to send a sci-fi-style avatar in their place.

That vision closed out Monday’s programming at the festival, as sold ina talk onstage by XPrize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis announcing the latest in a series of XPrize competitions, in which non-government teams from around the world compete to solve an intimidatingly-difficult problem.

TheANA Avatar XPrize, sponsored byAll Nippon Airways, will offer $10 million in total awards to whoever builds “a multipurpose avatar system that will seamlessly transport human skills and experience to the exact location where and when they are needed” by October 1, 2021.

Faraway, so close

Diamandis pitched the avatar concept as the logical outcome of exponential advances in computing power and robot capability meeting5G wireless with its gigabit-speed and low-latency connectivity.

Avatars would enable their human operators to see, hear and touch via the robot’s sensors and actuators, essentially allowing them to teleport their skills and knowledge to anywhere in the world — although the contest requirements only require the avatar to work from at least 100 kilometers away.

“It’s about dislocating the knowledge from the physical location of action,” he said.

The doctor and entrepreneur described three possible use cases: disaster recovery, multi-purpose utility and personal care.

The first seems obvious, since we already use robots to extend human senses to places too dangerous for a direct human presence. Diamandis raised the example of sending an avatar into a failing nuclear plant to adjust whatever controls might stop a meltdown.

The second might be a harder sell, at least in the examples of surgery by avatar that Diamandis raised. While avatars could get around the uneven geographical distribution of medical talent and training, they won’t give the world’s most talented surgeons any more time in which to practice their craft.

And personal care — as Diamandis put it, to “go someplace and give someone a hug” — will depend heavily not on how effectively the avatar conveys the scene to its human, but on how the avatar represents the human.

The contest rules don’t mandate human-looking robots. “We don’t specify what technology they should use or what it should look like,” Diamandis said. The avatars depicted in his presentation made no attempt to mimic humans along the lines of, say,the robots in the 2015 movie Ex Machina.

The first such contest, 1996’sAnsari X Prize, succeeded brilliantly in 2004 whenSpaceShipOne became the first privately-built reusable spaceship to complete two suborbital flights in two weeks.

In his talk, Diamandis lauded Richard Branson’s subsequent move to commercialize that rocket. He did not mention Virgin Galactic’s numerous setbacks — one test vehicle broke apart in flight in 2014, killing one pilot, andthe company has yet to resume powered test flights.